“Transports?” Honor raised an eyebrow at her operations officer, and Jaruwalski shrugged.

“That’s CIC’s best guess so far, Ma’am. Whatever they are, they’re big, but their wedge strength looks low for warships of their apparent tonnage. So it looks like they’re military auxiliaries of some sort, whether they’re actually transports or not.”

“I see.” Honor continued across the flag deck to her command chair and racked her own helmet on its side. Her command station was no more than three long strides from the flag plot, and her small com screen blinked to life as she eased Nimitz down from her shoulder and set him on the back of her chair. Rafe Cardones’ face looked out of it at her, and she smiled in welcome.

“Good morning, Rafe,” she said.

“Good morning, Ma’am,” he responded more formally, and his smile was a bit tighter than hers had been. “It looks like we’ve got visitors,” he added.

“So I’ve heard,” she agreed. “Give me a few minutes to get myself brought up to speed, and we’ll decide what sort of welcome mat we want to put out.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, and she turned her attention to the plot.

Werewolf was a new ship, and she and her sisters had been designed from the keel out to serve as task force or fleet flagships, so her flag plot’s holo sphere was at least two-thirds the size of CIC’s master plot. It was less cluttered than the master plot because the automatic filters removed distracting items—like the Marsh System’s civilian spacegoing infrastructure—which were both unnecessary and possibly confusing. They could be put back if Honor really wanted to see them, but at the moment she had eyes only for the red icons of unknown starships sweeping steadily inward from the system hyper limit.

“What’s their time to Sidemore orbit?” she asked.

“They came out on our side of the primary, Your Grace,” Lieutenant Theophile Kgari, her staff astrogator, replied crisply. Kgari’s grandparents had migrated to the Star Kingdom directly from Old Earth, and his skin was almost as dark as Michelle Henke’s. “They made transit at a very low velocity—no more than a hundred KPS or so, almost directly in-system. But they’ve been piling on the accel ever since. They translated out of hyper just under—” it was his turn to consult a time readout “—nineteen minutes ago, so they’re up to four-point-three-four thousand KPS. Assuming a zero/zero intercept with Sidemore, they’ll hit turnover in almost exactly two hours, at which time they’ll be up to approximately three-two-point-niner thousand KPS at seven-point-six-five light-minutes from the planet.”

“Thank you, Theo,” Honor said, turning to smile briefly at him before she returned her attention to the plot. She reached down to caress Nimitz’s ears once more as he sat upright on the back of her command chair. She stood that way for several thoughtful seconds, gazing at the light dots in the plot silently, then drew a deep breath, shrugged, and turned to face her staff.